So I watched a rocket blow up on Tuesday night and I still can't stop thinking about the engines.
If you missed it: Orbital Sciences launched an Antares rocket from Wallops Island, Virginia around 6:22pm on the 28th, carrying a Cygnus capsule stuffed with supplies for the space station, food, science gear, a coffee machine for the ISS crew apparently, that detail got a lot of play. About six seconds after liftoff the whole thing came apart in a fireball right over the pad. Nobody was hurt, which given how close some of the viewing areas are is honestly a small miracle. NASA TV had the feed up and I had it going in the background while I was doing dishes, and I actually yelled when it happened. My wife came in from the other room thinking something had happened in the kitchen.
Here's the part that's been stuck in my head since, though, and it's not the fireball. It's the engines.
The first stage of Antares runs on a pair of engines called AJ26. Nice boring aerospace name. Except AJ26 isn't a new engine: it's a refurbished NK-33, which was built in the Soviet Union in the late 1960s and early 1970s for the N-1, the moon rocket the USSR never got to actually put a person on top of successfully. When the Soviet moon program got cancelled the whole NK-33 production run just sat in a warehouse for decades. Aerojet bought a batch of them in the 90s, brought them to the US, refurbished them, renamed them, and started flying them on Antares. So the rocket that blew up Tuesday was, at least partly, running on 40-plus year old engines designed for a moon shot that never happened, built by engineers who are mostly not alive anymore, for a country that doesn't exist anymore.
I don't know that the engines are what actually failed. There's an investigation and it'll probably take months before anyone official says anything definitive, and Orbital already said they're looking hard at the first stage propulsion. But even before anyone confirms it my gut reaction is: of course. You cannot convince me that flying decades-old refurbished engines from a cancelled Cold War program is a fine long-term plan for getting cargo to a space station, even if it worked on paper and even if it flew fine a few times before. It's the kind of thing that sounds clever in a budget meeting and terrifying everywhere else. I get why they did it: building a new engine from scratch is absurdly expensive and NK-33s were sitting there, already built, already tested decades ago. But "already tested decades ago" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
What I keep coming back to is how casual the whole arrangement is when you say it out loud. We are resupplying an orbiting laboratory with a rocket bolted together partly out of parts from a country that dissolved in 1991. That's either the coolest sentence I've written all month or the most alarming one, I genuinely can't decide.
NASA's already said the cargo runs will keep going through SpaceX in the meantime, so this isn't going to strand anyone up there, there's a decent stockpile on the station and Dragon capsules can pick up slack. So it's not a crisis, more just a very expensive, very public bad day for Orbital Sciences, and a bad day for anyone who had experiments riding in that Cygnus. Somebody's grad school thesis probably went up in that fireball, which is a specific kind of awful I don't think enough of the coverage mentioned.
Unrelated, but it's Halloween today and I have exactly zero costume plans and a bowl of candy corn nobody in this house will eat, myself included, candy corn is a scam, always has been. My daughter wants to be a "computer" for trick-or-treating which as far as I can tell just means wearing a cardboard box with a drawn-on keyboard, and I'm mildly proud that's where her brain went first.
Anyway. Watch the launch footage if you haven't — it's out there already, uploaded within hours — and then go read about the NK-33 if you want a rabbit hole. It's a genuinely wild engine with a genuinely wild history, cancelled moon program and all, and Tuesday was maybe the least surprising way for that history to catch up with something.